This is a new mesh, and means that it's a brand new self contained object that usually does not require a specific Expansion pack (although this is possible depending on the type). It may have Recolours hosted on MTS - check below the description for more information.

This is a featured upload! It showcases the best talent and creativity available on MTS and in the community.

You may have seen this floating around on the forums here a few months ago; I started this project way back when in May (and teased it in one of the screenshots here), but computer issues kept me from finishing it off. Now, at last, my Christmas gift to you:

New, from Shiny Things Inc., meet Servo!

Quote:

Gardening? Check. Cooking? Check. Periodic bursts of wanton destruction? Indeed, check. This friendly humanoid robot is truly but one step from humanity. The Servo Model has a gender-assignable artificial intelligence unit that simulates all the desires of a real human: friendship, success... even love. Just make sure you keep the Servo Model in a good mood, else you'll be the one cleaning up all the ash piles while your new friend lies sparking in the corner.

I have loved the Servos, our sims' delightful mechanical servants, since Livin' Large way back when. It only felt appropriate to convert them to the latest iteration of the game - but I wanted to make sure it was functional as well as pretty, which meant that sims with the Servo outfit could never not have it on - this meant not only when naked, but also while in career or special event outfits. This meant, of course, that I couldn't just go the easy route and make the Servo body a simple item of clothing that could be taken on or off at will - but I did manage it using some workarounds and some neat features TS4 introduced to the CAS system, with some help from the wonderful CmarNYC.

The key was the bear costume that came with Outdoor Retreat - it's an outfit that completely covers your sim, ignores their slider values and anything they might be wearing. I spent some time picking it apart, figuring out how it worked and managed to replicate the effect for my Servos.

Having accomplished that much, I thought to myself...what about if Servo has an elegant party to wait on?

And then...what if Servo gets bitten by a vampire? Or a werewolf?

And then...what if Servo stumbles upon an archaic tome?

And that is the story of how my OCD forced me to convert every single kind of Servo we had in The Sims 2. Plus some extras, like added recolours of female Servo's garishly pink dress!

You get a total of 9 items - 6 skin details, 2 necklaces, and a bonus buy object!

How To Use

Find one of three basic Servo bodies (normal, fanged, witch) under Skin details

Go to Necklaces and apply the formal outfit if desired

Done!

Yes, that's right - skin details and necklaces. That's the workaround I mentioned earlier - in order for Servo to keep its outfit on no matter what, its basic body (the nude version) is classed as a skin detail, and can be found in that section of CAS. There are six versions of the basic body - normal, fanged, and witch, each in male and female versions, and with all the original textures from TS2. Just pick whichever one you want, click, and poof! Like magic, your sim has now disappeared, along with any accessories, hair, clothing, you name it! All that's left is your new Servo, and maybe a necklace, if your old sim was wearing one.

If you don't care about a formal outfit, that's all you need to do. One click application, couldn't be easier!

Now, about that necklace - your Servo includes a tuxedo for males, and a dress for females, both classed as necklaces (this is for coding reasons, my workaround wouldn't work as smoothly any other way). Go to the formalwear tab, and then find the formal outfit under necklaces - click and, voilą, your Servo is now spiffy! What's actually happened here is his body has been substituted for a new one - the only thing that stays from the old mesh is the head, which means you can mix and match between the different heads and the different formal outfits with ease. This works because of the "cut" system in TS4 - like how certain boots hide a part of your pants, or have parts of themselves hidden by pants, depending on the combination. I've exploited this for use with these Servos. The formal outfits are actually just headless bodies that are set to a higher priority in the "cut" hierarchy than the basic bodies - but the heads that are attached to the basic bodies are set to a higher priority than the formal bodies, so they don't get hidden, allowing you to mix two full-body outfits and streamlining the whole thing to a huge degree. Pretty neat, huh?

Once your selection is made, you can't click on the heads to select them in CAS (this is by design, to avoid a couple of bugs that would deform the heads otherwise), but you can select the Servos by clicking on their bodies, which will take you to the hats screen. From here you can find your way around CAS and change what you want - nude body under skin details, and formalwear under necklaces. Simply remove them as you would any other CAS item to get a normal sim back. Oh, and, don't eat them - the FDA has yet to approve Servo for human consumption.

The meshes and textures are all from The Sims 2's expansion packs, and are completely vanilla and unchanged in any way, except for the hands - TS2 is a ten year old game, and the hands are very low poly compared to TS4. This means that, no matter how much I were to fiddle with bone assignments, the animations were never going to line up properly. So I gave the Servos the high-detail The Sims 4 hands to make sure that the animations line up perfectly, and then painstakingly traced the original TS2 hand texture using a vector image program and adjusted it to fit over the The Sims 4 hands' UV map. The result is something that looks like the original hands, but has the beautifully smooth movement the TS4 hands do.

The dress also comes in 7 extra colours, just in case eye-searing pink isn't to your taste - red, black, purple, brown, green, white and blue - the latter six colours are all matched to the witch hat, so you can use them together without fear!

The bonus Buy Mode object is a conversion of the deactivated Servo from The Sims 2: Open For Business. It can be found under Electronics / Misc. and costs §6210. It only comes with a male head, like in the original game, and this one doesn't have new hands. It's just a straight conversion, is purely decorative, and is cloned from a small plant, so it will fit on pretty much any shelf.

You are invited to create recolours and new outfits for these guys! You are free to use the textures and meshes as a base (I am particularly hoping someone gives the female Servo some nice new dresses, and maybe a new hat or two!), but please don't distribute these meshes with your recolours, link back here instead.

Known Issues

Some of the joints on the tuxedo shoulders and around the middle of the dress look a little strange when running certain animations. This is an issue present in the original Servos in The Sims 2 as well, and something I tried to mitigate as much as possible with very tedious and gradually changing bone assignments, but I could only fix the issues with the skirt of the dress. This is something that is due to the small number of vertices in these areas, and not something that can be remedied.

Additionally, certain necklaces will display their texture on the witch / warlock hats - this is due to a conflict in how I mapped the high-resolution TS2 hat texture. It's not a problem for the dress or tuxedo in this upload, but if you see the hat texture being weird, it's not a glitch! Just take off the necklace and it will be fine

Polygon Counts:

Each outfit has only one LOD, since they are from relatively low-polygon The Sims 2 meshes. The buy item has all three levels of detail, since it is very high-poly for a build/buy object.

Huge thanks to CmarNYC for helping me solve the many glitches that kept coming up!

Thanks as always to MTS for hosting and EA for publishing the game.

Textures made with Inkscape and The GIMP, meshes modified with Milkshape 3D and imported using CmarNYC's CASTools, package compiled with Sims4Studio. Meshes and textures modified from The Sims 2: Open For Business, The Sims 2: Pets, The Sims 2: Apartment Life and The Sims 4.

Very special thanks to scotch for keeping me from pulling my hair out, and a shout out to my perfectionism for making this take so long. Oh, and thank you for reading all of this. Here, have a robot cookie.